Cultural Tourism
ATLAS Special Interest Group
Cultural Tourism
The coordinator for this Special Interest Group is:
Greg Richards – Breda University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands
The Cultural Tourism Research Group (CTRG) has worked over the past 30 years to develop our understanding of the relationship between tourism and culture. Over this period the group has undertaken over 50,000 visitor surveys and produced many publications, including Cultural Tourism in Europe, Cultural Attractions and European Tourism, Cultural Tourism: Global and local perspectives, Cultural Tourism: Negotiating identities, The Changing Context of Cultural Tourism, Cultural Tourism Research Methods, The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Tourism, the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Bibliography and Rethinking Cultural Tourism. Many journal articles and special journal issues have also been produced by group members, often stemming from the regular meetings held at the ATLAS Annual Conference and at expert meetings.
You can find out more about the work of the group, including publications, the Cultural Tourism Bibliography, the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Survey Questionnaire on the group pages hosted at https://www.richardstourism.com/atlas-cultural-tourism-project.
If you want to contact the SIG coordinator, please fill in the form HERE
If you want to join this SIG, please fill in the form HERE
Annual review of activities 2024
The Cultural Tourism Group continues to focus on research and publications on the complex relationship between tourism and culture.
In the last two years we have collaborated with the CULTSENSE Project to examine the issue of cultural sensitivity in travel. CultSense has been doing pioneering work on the cultural dimension of tourism, and has developed extremely useful tools that can be used in teaching and research. The Pedagogical Toolkit provides a broad range of insightful case studies that raise cross-cultural issues related to war tourism, Finnish sauna culture, gastronomy, religious heritage and ERASMUS mobility. These resources are also supported by useful reflections on potential applications through the CultSense Quality Tools. You can read a report of the joint conference organised by ATLAS and Cultsense in Rotterdam in 2023 here. One of the keynote speakers at the Rotterdam conference was Wil Munsters, one of the founding members of the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Research Group. In his address he dealt with the thorny issue of animals in cultural tourism, who often become unwilling actors in cultural scenes staged for tourists.
Wil’s latest book, Théories et pratiques du tourisme culturel. Une étude de modèles et de leurs applications, builds on his great summary of Cultural Tourism in Ten Models. This work surveys many of the theoretical and practical insights covered by the work of the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Group over the years. A number of previous publications of the group have now been made available open access thanks to the support of Tilburg University :
Richards, G. (2021.) Rethinking Cultural Tourism. Edward Elgar.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Russo, A.P. and Richards, G. (2016). Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place. Channel View Publications.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Richards, G. and Munsters, W. (2010) Cultural Tourism Research Methods. CABI.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Richards G. and Wilson, J. (2007) Tourism, Creativity and Development. Routledge.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Richards, G. (2001) Cultural Attractions and European Tourism. CABI: Wallingford.
Link to full text on Researchgate
Richards, G. (1996) Cultural Tourism in Europe. CABI: Wallingford.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
In 2024 the group will be undertaking a number of activities. Two special tracks will be organised for the ATLAS Annual Conference in Breda in June 2024. Maria del Pilar Leal and Jordi Arcos-Pumarola from CETT Barcelona, are organising sessions on Navigating the future of intangible cultural heritage in an evolving world, and Jessika Weber Sabil of Breda University of Applied Sciences and Lénia Marques of Erasmus University Rotterdam are coordinating a track on Digital Cultural Tourism. These tracks have both attracted considerable interest, and we hope they will also generate new publication outputs.
In 2024 ATLAS will begin collaborating in a Horizon Europe project on Cross-Border Cultural and Creative Tourism in Rural and Remote Areas (CROCUS). The project is being led by Aalborg University (Denmark) and a number of other ATLAS member institutions are partners in the project, including the University of Maribor (Slovenia), the University of Rijeka (Croatia), the University of Bergamo (Italy) and the University of Pannonia (Hungary). The project will analyse how cultural and creative tourism (CCT) development can help rural and remote regions to overcome key challenges through a holistic placemaking approach. The partners will assess CCT business models through cross-border living labs and prototyping and develop policy scenarios for four EU macro-regions (Baltic Sea, Adriatic and Ionian, Alpine, and Danube). The project will run until 2027, and members of the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Group will be helping to develop the theoretical and methodological dimension of the project, as well as disseminating the knowledge generated by the project through publications and presentations (including future ATLAS Conferences). Having helped to develop the original analysis of Cultural Tourism for the EU (Richards, 1996), it is appropriate that Creative Tourism, also a product of previous ATLAS work, is now being included in this EU project.
As it is almost a quarter century since the creative tourism concept was developed during the ATLAS Winter University in Viana do Castelo in Portugal in 2000 (Richards and Raymond, 2000), we are making plans to mark this event during the 2025 ATLAS Annual Conference in Tarragona, Spain. We will be inviting a range of leading thinkers on creative tourism to a special panel, which will debate the past, present and future of the creative tourism phenomenon.
References
Quinn, B., & Kinnunen, M. (2024). Guest editorial: Sharing and belonging in festival and event space: introduction to special issue. International Journal of Event and Festival Management, 15(1), 1-6.
Richards, G., & Raymond, C. (2000). Creative tourism. ATLAS news, 23(8), 16-20. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254822440_Creative_Tourism